Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Concurrent Kleene Algebra With Tests And Branching Automata, Peter Jipsen, M. Andrew Moshier

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

We introduce concurrent Kleene algebra with tests (CKAT) as a combination of Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) of Kozen and Smith with concurrent Kleene algebras (CKA), introduced by Hoare, Möller, Struth and Wehrman. CKAT provides a relatively simple algebraic model for reasoning about semantics of concurrent programs. We generalize guarded strings to guarded series-parallel strings , or gsp-strings, to give a concrete language model for CKAT. Combining nondeterministic guarded automata of Kozen with branching automata of Lodaya and Weil one obtains a model for processing gsp-strings in parallel. To ensure that the model satisfies the weak exchange law (x‖y)(z‖w)≤(xz)‖(yw) of …